Sorry to involve you in my adventures of buying a new laptop in this way. After various hardware issues with my first and second attempt, I'm now on the third machine that I hope will be my new laptop. It's an HP 15-ba-055na. I have installed Mageia 5.1 from the installation DVD, and so far everything seems to be working fine except the wifi connection. I have searched the forum for the name of the chipset (Realtek 8723BE) but the few results don't seem to describe the same problem as mine.

Mageia recognises the wifi adapter and has a dedicated driver for it. The problem is that - although not blocked - the device usually can't see any wireless networks. On the rare occasions where it has detected my router (about 6 metres away) it fails to connect. I have found information about weak signal with this adapter and some solutions relating to Ubuntu (http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubun ... altek.html and http://www.linuxlinx.com/2016/05/instal ... xmint.html) but I don't have the knowledge to judge whether the solutions could work in Mageia. For the moment, I'm connecting to the wifi via my mobile phone using USB tethering. But it would be great to get this to work.

I hope this is the information you need in order to help. Perhaps some settings can be changed to make this work. If I understand those Ubuntu-related postings correctly, the problem may have something to do with the power management of the combined wifi/Bluetooth adapter. I know that my router is sending a strong enough signal because all other devices (mobile phone, tablet, desktop PC, old laptop) can connect to it.

Thank you!

Last edited by Gelsenbury on Feb 9th, '18, 20:08, edited 3 times in total.

Looks good in general. Did you try the solution from the links you posted? Not the part about compiling different drivers, but trying the rtl8723be module options to see whether that changes the behaviour?This post also shows how to unload the driver and load it with different options in the lower half of the post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=208472

According to the explanation, this enables software encryption and disables the power management options and the watchdog. I don't fully understand what this all means! Using these settings, I could see my router after several attempts and connect to it, but with very poor signal strength (22% apparently) and slow speed, and with frequent drop-outs. I would expect to see my neighbours' networks as well, and have a stronger and much more stable connection.

But I did go through the antenna selection from the command line as detailed on https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=208472. On the first attempt, I appeared to find that both antennas detected my own router equally badly (34/70 was mentioned for signal strength). From the second attempt onwards (with the intention to replicate this output and post it here), things got even worse, with the network-related applets and the root konsole window in which I typed the commands becoming unresponsive. According to the System Activity monitor that I can look at after pressing Ctrl-Esc, net_applet and iwlist have gone to "disk sleep". But I can't terminate those processes from there. I have tried and re-tried this with several reboots, and the issue occurs sometimes after the "rmmod rtl8723be" command and sometimes after the "iwlist wlo1 scan" command. Very frustrating.

The network adapter still works under Windows, so I don't think it's damaged. There just seems to be something wrong with what I'm trying to do here. Surely there must be a solution?

And, just in case this is useful information: I have managed to connect to the network at work, by sitting directly underneath a router (about 1 metre away). The signal strength according to the Network Centre is 52%. The scan of available networks gives the following:

I am connected to the first of these networks. So it seems as if connecting to a router that is very nearby can work. The signal just isn't detected well. This causes problems unless you are sitting right next to the router.

- play around with the options of the currently used driver, but you're on your own on that as probably nobody else here has the same wireless combination that you have- try the newer alternative driver, which you need to compile beforehand- get a different wireless card/chipset- use a wired connection

Thank you for the overview. I think I have experimented enough with the driver settings. There aren't that many of them, and any improvements have been modest.

It's useful information that the alternate driver is newer than the one currently installed. I wasn't sure about that. I've never successfully compiled anything and it's been years since I've even tried, but I'll have a go.

And, just in case this is useful information: I have managed to connect to the network at work, by sitting directly underneath a router (about 1 metre away). The signal strength according to the Network Centre is 52%. The scan of available networks gives the following:

From what I read in various places about the older driver it's more a combination of the options, as with some there will be no signal if you use the wrong ant_sel settings, it will use a different antenna port where nothing is connected on the internal ports.Also see some of the discussion regarding the options at e.g. https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new/issues/34

I'm not having much luck with this. I built the driver from https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new successfully as far as I can tell. I downloaded the zip archive and unpacked it. The "make" command completes without error message, and "make install" (as root) finishes with a "success" message. I have also created /etc/modprobe.d/50-rtl8723be.conf as instructed. I have also tried selecting one antenna or the other manually, but can still not see any networks. Incidentally, the same happens with the driver from https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new ... new_btcoex.

Here are the current contents of /etc/modprobe.d/50-rtl8723be.conf, after some experimentation. The file name is straight from https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new/issues/34, but I have created the symbolic links rtl8723be.conf and 50_rtl8723be.conf in the same directory pointing at that file, just in case.

At least that is the usual result. Very rarely, the scan has revealed one or more networks, but they disappear before I can connect to them.

Again, the wireless adapter works under Windows, and I am currently connected to the internet via USB tethering through my Android phone, which is connected to my router by wifi. So I think the hardware is OK.

Have I overlooked something? For example, do I have to remove the existing driver in some way before building the new one? I followed the hints and instructions, but bear in mind that my knowledge is limited.

Still seems to be the original mga5 driver. Do you have the "make install" output available, or can you run "make uninstall" and "make install" again and add the output, it should show where the newer drivers gets installed. Maybe we need to adapt the module search order for that path. Do you also happen to remember if make install ran depmod ?

Have you compared the size of the driver in /lib/modules with the size of the one you compiled? Perhaps the one you compiled did not replace the one in /lib/modules...permissions problem perhaps?

Try this. From the directory you compiled the driver in, as root, execute "rmmod rtl8723be" (or rmmod rtl8723be.ko ...I never remember which it is). After you confirm the driver is unloaded, execute "insmod ./rtl8723be.ko" and see what happens.

You might also try entering the line "rtl8723be fwlps=0 ips=0 swlps=0 swenc=0 disable_watchdog=1" in /etc/modules. I'm not optimistic that will work, but I am hearkening back a long long time, to a day when this was how you set options for kernel drivers in Linux. I seem to recall that the file was named modules.conf there, but I'm not positive and would have to root through some really musty archives to sort it out for sure.

The first attempt fails for some reason. After the second, iwlist wlo1 scan shows my home router ... but only that one. I'm expecting to see the neighbours' networks too, so we still seem to be weak at picking up signal. It's similar to the phenomenon I said I occasionally get with the original driver.

[root@manchot_trois etc]# cat modules# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.## This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are# to be loaded at boot time, one per line. Comments begin with# a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored.

1.) I should have checked iwconfig after following your instruction to insert the rtl8723be.ko module manually. It seems to create an interface labelled wlan0, not wlo1. But the outcome actually remains the same: No scan results from iwlist wlan0 scan either.

2.) Having tried this a couple of times, I now can't seem to do it any more. Since doing this alone didn't solve the problem, perhaps it isn't important. But I don't understand this behaviour.

3.) There seems to be a more general problem with the net applet / network centre, which may or may not be related. As an interim measure while trying to work out the rtl8723be driver, I have tried three (!) different USB wifi adapters with three different chipsets. I can get a good wifi connection with one of them (after building the driver, which is not relevant here), but only by changing to a text-only environment with Ctrl-Alt-F2 and running drakconnect in text mode. In the graphical interface, the networks are not shown although iwlist ra0 scan in a console window shows them. (More competent users may be able to connect via the command line interface from there, but I need drakconnect, which works in text-only but not in graphical mode.)

Quick update on this: I'm trying the sta2 of Mageia 6 (Live DVD), and unfortunately the problem is the same. The wireless connection is weak, slow, and unreliable. Either the driver in kernel 4.9.13 is still the same, or it's no better than the old one. My hopes are fading.

This issue seems to have been solved by a recent update. I can now connect to wi-fi and get a stable connection. Note that I'm still running Mageia 5.1 on this machine. I don't know whether Mageia 6 will work equally well.

Right, I'm now getting exactly the same problem again after upgrading to Mageia 6. This is an upgrade rather than a fresh install (went fine, by the way - pleasant experience!), so all the user settings should still be the same. It must be something outside of my home directory that's causing the problem.

Under Mageia 5.1, the issue just "went away" as documented above. One day, it just started working. I obviously have no idea how that happened, but perhaps it will happen with Mageia 6 too. In the meantime, please let me know any new ideas.

Just in case it's useful, here's the output corresponding to what I posted at the start of the thread, when I was still running Mageia 5.1:

The network detected by iwlist wlo1 scan is my home network. But the signal is weak, and the connection is unreliable. Sometimes this doesn't show up at all. It's exactly as it first was under Mageia 5.1.

Again, this is not a hardware issue because it eventually worked (reliably and for a long time) under Mageia 5.1. The problem is that I don't know what caused it to work back then!

And, again, after several days of running and updating (using USB tethering with my phone), the problem seems to be solved.

Either my setting of the driver parameters needed more than one restart and finally stuck; or a recent update has fixed the issue. I still don't know which is correct, but I'm marking this as solved again.

It's probably an issue with the driver itself, not the driver settings. The most recent kernel update has caused the wifi to malfunction in the same way again (not seeing networks, dropping connections, and basically being unreliable). I tried changing the various driver settings, with no effect. I uninstalled kernel 4.14.40 and booted back into kernel 4.14.30, and the problems are gone.